Ryan Wilson on Last Stand for Children First

Crikey!  I don't really know how an Aussie like me ever landed a gig like this, but I thought I'd share a bit about my own experience in the Great Down Under with Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  You see Australia is shaped like a donut.  It's got a desert in the middle that's pretty uninhabitable and we blokes and sheilas mostly live on the outside.  That means that when Arne and myself were playing for the Eastside Spectres, we had a lot of bus trips together.  While the other players were playing cards or talking about their latest sexual exploits, Arne and me we're in the back of the bus discussing the American education system--Fair Dinkum!


LastStand hopes to be an advocate for the voiceless in education--the millionaires and billionaires who have been denied a voice for so long.  Now, I  know this isn't going to be a piece of piss if we don't attract people from all economic levels to join us, if we're going to bring about any kind of change that is Ridgey-didge.  I may have been a basketball player professionally for a dozen years myself, but Australia isn't the NBA and a few too many times hitting the turps has left me a might short of a million myself.

I look at what we do as an organization to be a lot like the end of the movie Hoosiers.   Remember when Gene Hackman as Coach Norman Dale calls for the picket fence?  Jimmy takes the final shot, but in the picket fence everybody has to do their part to make it happen.  There's a quality back pass and 3 teammates who are willing to block any obstacles that get in Jimmy's way.

I believe that we at LastStand can be the picket fence for today's students.  If we all work together and do our part, we can all be winners.  I'm glad to have such amazing teammates and a ripper point guard like Myron Miner.